All over except the counting.

The Millennium March on Washington comes to its financial day of reckoning

The Millennium March on Washington took place in April, but when it comes to its finances, the event is far from over. More than seven months after the last; marcher left the Mall, the board is still trying to secure money that it is owed, reassure creditors, and determine how to deal with a roughly $1 million mountain of debt.

"We need to make sure that there's an audit," says march treasurer Michael Armentrout. "We need to make sure that we collect every dime we are owed and distribute it fairly and evenly across all the creditors we owe."

A full audit of the march's finances was scheduled to begin in early December. However, Armentrout says unaudited figures show that organizers spent about $1.9 million and owe approximately $965,000 to a variety of creditors. The Human Rights Campaign, one of the event's original sponsors, is also its largest creditor, with a $360,000 debt from money advanced to the march. (HRC also gave the march $200,000 in profits from its Equality Rocks concert, which took place the evening before the march.) Among other major creditors are Gay.com and Liberation Publications Inc., owner of The Advocate. Both companies advanced organizers $100,000 just prior to the march in order to cover expenses and ensure the event could go on. In early December Gay.com forgave its debt.

Armentrout says the march kept to its spending limits but did not make the income it anticipated. "We had several places on the revenue budget that were real failures," he says. Three major areas of projected revenue failed to realize their goals. The most well-known is the profits from the Millennium Festival, a weekend-long street fair offering food and beverages to marchgoers. After the march, hundreds of thousands of dollars were reported missing from the festival, leading to an FBI investigation that has yet to be completed. Armentrout says the shortfall may be as much as $750,000, although festival organizers put the sum at only $160,000. The missing money has not been recovered, nor have law enforcement officials identified any suspects in the theft.

March organizers had also anticipated earning $400,000 from hotel commissions. Instead, they earned only a quarter of that amount, much of which has yet to be collected. More than four dozen hotels had contracts with the Millennium March to provide rooms through a special Web site, with a portion of the fees collected for booked rooms benefiting the march. However, says Armentrout, "the provider of the hotel reservation system had an inefficient Web site and couldn't handle some of the technical issues that were arising." The result was that people skipped the Web site to book rooms. "We know that there was not a hotel vacancy within 60 miles of Washington the weekend of the march, but our reservation system got circumvented."

Finally, profits from the sale of official T-shirts failed to materialize, as did money from several other events affiliated with the march. Other than HRC's donation from Equality Rocks, the only other money the march received from an event that weekend was $2,000 from a dance party. "The rest of the events said they didn't make money or refused to contribute," Armentrout says.

Although most of the income should Have come during he event itself, fund-raising Efforts were impaired even before the march. The Ad Hoc Committee for an Open Process, formed by activists opposed to the way the march was being organized, bitterly criticized the planned march, harming its image with outsiders, Armentrout says.

"There was such opposition to the march that when we made six-figure requests of major donors, they said the march was controversial and gave only $40,000," he says. "It substantially impaired our ability to raise corporate sponsorship."

Armentrout, who has spent $12,500 of his own money in contributions to and expenses incurred for the march, says that raising the money to pay off the march's debt is perhaps impossible. "It's one thing to raise a couple hundred thousand to pay debts; it's another to raise a million," he says. "There isn't a million out there in the community."

As a result, the march's legacy will probably include a flood of red ink, much the way other national events have ended in unpaid debt. To Armentrout, it's a sad ending. "With very few exceptions, even among people we owe money to today, the march was a success," he says. "It was a transformative experience for a lot of people. It's very painful if it didn't work out financially.

To find out more about the Millenium March and its finances, go to www.advocate.com